Birthday
by Fujisaki Chihiro
Summary: -30.06- Peko thinks a tool doesn't deserve birthday wishes. Kuzuryuu thinks differently.


**Author's Note: The moment I started reading the Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Let's Play, I fell in love with this ship. *sighs due to heartbreak***

* * *

**Birthday**

Peko Pekoyama woke up early one morning with a sense of foreboding. A glance at the luminous hands of her bedside clock told her that it was 4 AM on the thirtieth of June.

30.06

Peko's face was utterly emotionless as she stared at the string of numbers. This date. It was meaningless, right? It was nothing more than another day in the world she lived in. It wasn't special in any way.

Yet Peko's heart knew that she was lying.

Seventeen years ago today, she knew, a baby was born in the Pekoyama family. It was a baby girl with fiery red eyes, and whenever she wasn't crying like any other baby, she was always serious-faced. Her name was...

_Stop it Peko,_ she chided herself, putting an abrupt end to the useless thought. _Stop it, there's no use digging up old memories._ They all lead to that particularly painful one...

...of a red-eyed baby girl being transferred from a pair of weak, withered hands to a far more superior pair, smooth and powerful, but covered with blood. The girl was given away. Abandoned. Unwanted, and left in the hands of the family whose name alone strikes fear... a family of gangsters...

Peko stood up from her bed abruptly. She thought sternly, _these pointless thoughts must stop._

She decided to go and take a bath. That ought to help her keep her wits about her. After collecting her clothes, she went to the door and opened it to go to the bathroom she usually uses, the one down the hall.

"Agh...! Shit...!"

There was a thump and a thud, and suddenly Peko saw Kuzuryuu on his backside, rubbing his head which he'd bumped on Peko's door. "Ggh... That fucking hurt... Why d'you have to be so strong, Peko?" he grumbled.

"Young Master!" Peko quickly helped him up. "I apoloize profusely for being reckless and hurting you. Are you all right? ...Please forgive me."

"Nngh, s'okay," he said, still dazed although he was now standing up. "It was probably my fault anyway. I shouldn't have stopped in front of your door."

"No, please don't apologize..." Peko suddenly stopped speaking. Why _had _Kuzuryuu stopped in front of her door, anyway? And to have bumped his head on her door when she opened it, he must have put his head quite close to it. The gears in Peko's hyperalert brain whirred. Kuzuryuu had been there. Kneeling. Listening. Eavesdropping.

"Young Master, if I may be so forward... What were you doing in front of my door, anyway?"

"Eh? What I was doing in front of your door?" He looked away, and Peko detected a hint of red creeping up to his cheeks (which were already quite pink to begin with), although she couldn't imagine why. "Heh, it's not anything you have to know. Anyway, Peko, there's something I need to do now. Catch you later." He turned and hastened away quickly without waiting for an answer.

"I guess I will see you later also, Young Master." Peko waved a little at Kuzuryuu's vanishing back, still thinking that that encounter had been very strange.

Peko suddenly allowed herself a small smile. Kuzuryuu didn't remember a birthday. The birthday of the girl with the fiery red eyes. _Her_ birthday. But it was more than fine with her. The young master didn't owe her any acts of kindness, nor did he owe her birthday wishes. After all, she was only a weapon, a tool. Why should anyone say "happy birthday" to a tool? With the thought ringing in her mind, she started to walk to the bathroom.

_Young Master Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu._

The son of the Kuzuryuu family, the family of mafiosos and gun aficionados, whose name strikes fear in the hearts of people. You'd think Kuzuryuu was caked with scars and had a dark complexion with suspiciously shifty eyes, but in fact, Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu was exactly the opposite.

He had close-cropped blond hair and eyes of the same color. His cheeks were always pink as if he was blushing permanently, and he had freckles across his nose and a birthmark near his mouth. He was a bit shorter than Peko.

In short, Peko sometimes thought he was rather...

Cute.

That's it, Peko thought, when she realized that she herself was blushing. Luckily, she had reached the bathroom, so she wouldn't be questioned.

* * *

...

Meanwhile, not far from there, Kuzuryuu was hiding behind one of the big pillars supporting the ceiling of the hallway. He muttered to himself, "Shit, that was too close." What was he _doing,_ anyway? Kneeling in front of Peko's door listening for something he wasn't even sure of himself, when Peko could open that door at any second. He must have been really stupid.

Nevertheless, he craned his neck around the pillar and saw with satisfaction that Peko was entering the bathroom.

Since they'd been friends for a really long time, he knew exactly how long Peko would be in the bathroom. That was what he liked about Peko – she was predictable. That, and the fact that she was bruise-inducing tough, brave, kind, and...

_Stop it stop it stop it,_ he thought severely. _You're getting yourself distracted. I have to finish it before she finishes her bath._

However, he knew that it meant he still had quite plenty of time.

...

Kuzuryuu still had plently of time to do whatever it was he had been doing because Peko liked to think in the shower. And this time, she was actually thinking about Kuzuryuu. The memories which she'd been trying to suppress came whizzing back, but this time Peko let them take over, taking her into her distant past.

Her first memory of young gangster-kun was of him sulking. If she remembered correctly, they were three years old (even then, Peko's hyperalert mind had noticed and remembered details). A voice had told her, "This is young master Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu."

Peko did try to play nice – she even shared one of her two lollipops with this "young master" character – but it was Kuzuryuu who started looking for trouble. Although Peko's two braids were still really short, he still found them convenient to pull. It hurt quite a lot, so Peko turned around and simply hit him. Her strength was remarkable even back then, and she made the young master cry (rather loudly, too).

She was alarmed especially because she'd been told to play nice with him, so she told him that she would gladly give him her lollipop if he would stop crying and not tell anyone about what she'd done. At first, he only cried even louder (to annoy me, Peko thought) but in the end he decided that he did want her lollipop after all.

And then Peko's mind jumped to the childhood memory she remembered the most. It was of a grown-up's voice saying some lines which until now stayed burned in her conscience.

It was the day she became a tool.

She attempted to push those thoughts away, but to no avail. It felt like the sun on a hot summer day – it still blinded you even if you closed your eyes.

_You must watch the young master at all times._

_You must attune yourself perfectly to his actions and desires._

_You must develop the capacity to identify and eliminate threats to the young master immediately._

_I am the young master's tool._

A small voice suddenly piped up in Peko's mind.

_I became the young master's tool, _she thought...

_And it's the best thing that has ever happened to me._

* * *

_..._

Meanwhile, Kuzuryuu found himself standing there clueless.

_Okay, shit, you can do this, _he thought. _You're the heir of the largest yakuza syndicate in Japan. You can so fucking do this._

He didn't know what else he could have done. His stakeout earlier hadn't told him anything what Peko would have wanted as a gift. Instead it had given him a bump on the head. So he had to go with something mainstream.

_Okay. What flavor would she like? Does she like chocolate?_ His hands hovered over the bar of dark chocolate. He'd seen Peko melt one of those for some of his favorite sweet treats...

"No, Fuyu-nii. She's not gonna like that."

Kuzuryuu jumped and whirled around, and he was glad when he saw that it was only his little sister. She had the same blond hair, and to Kuzuryuu's shame she was almost as tall as him.

"Did you really have to surprise me?" he griped.

"Well, yeah, since you're my older bro, I'm supposed to annoy you to death," she said breezily, walking into the room. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"Nothing," Kuzuryuu said.

"Nothing my ass," his sister grinned. "Ooh, I know what you're doing, Fuyu-nii. You're baking a cake for Peko's birthday, right?"

"No!"

"Oh, come on," his sister laughed. "It's sooo obvious. You're going to bake her a cake and then you're gonna ask her to be your gir—"

"Fuck no!" Kuzuryuu snapped. "Stop spouting that useless crap! I'm not doing anything of the sort!"

"Fine then," his sister sang. "I'm just gonna sit there and read while you go about doing whatever it is you're doing. But I'm telling you in advance that the flavor most suitable for Peko would be vanilla. Don't give her chocolate, she hates that."

"Yeah yeah," Kuzuryuu rolled his eyes. "Fine. Thanks for telling me. I'll keep that in mind."

"You're welcome." Suddenly his sister's smirk got wider. "Does that mean you _are_ baking a cake for her birthday?"

Kuzuryuu stopped, suddenly realizing what he'd indirectly implied.

"No...!"

* * *

...

Peko finally finished her bath. She now sat in front of the mirror, in the middle of the process of braiding her hair. Once she had tied the ends of her braids with red bands, she decorated them with white ribbons.

She suddenly smiled, remembering the first time she had learned how to braid her hair by herself, when she was around eight years old. It was the young mistress, Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu's little sister, who taught her that. At that time, she had shown her how to braid her hair and then decorate them with red ribbons, a skill which she'd probably got from her mother, Mistress Kuzuryuu.

However, sometime after that, she remembered a particular day when the young master simply came over to her and handed her two white ribbons without a word. Upon accepting them, she had asked, "Um... what are these for?"

He had replied, "For your hair, of course. You've been doing your hair with red ribbons, but I personally like white... I think it kinda suits you better."

"Hah! Fuyu-nii, what do boys know about fashion sense?" the young mistress had shrilled. Although she was very young at that time, she claimed she already had impeccable "fashion sense".

"Shut up," the young master had snapped, but Peko had smiled a small smile.

"...Thank you," she had said. "These are pretty. I will use them to braid my hair."

_You must attune yourself perfectly to his actions and desires._

But Peko did have to admit that white suited her. Pretty well, in fact.

Or maybe she only thought that because it was one of the young master's _desires?_

She didn't know, and she doubted she would. But she didn't mind.

* * *

...

Kuzuryuu stepped back. "Umm... Sis..."

"Yeah?" His sister didn't look up from the book she was reading.

"I don't like the looks of this. Is the oven really supposed to do this shit? This doesn't look like normal oven behavior..."

"What the heck have you been doing while I was read—" His sister's eyes suddenly widened upon looking up and seeing the oven. "Gyaaaaaaah!"

"Shit," cried Kuzuryuu. "I think it's going to explode!"

* * *

...

If the last time Peko expressed anger was when she was three years old, the last time she _felt_ anger was when she was nine. That time, Kuzuryuu had climbed up a tree and refused to come down. The branch he was precariously perched on was so high up from Peko's perspective. Even so, it was impossible to get him down. Peko had never felt so helpless in her life. She was supposed to protect the young master, and there she had stood, powerless and unable to do anything. After all, she was supposed to protect the young master, even if it means she had to give up her life to do it...

* * *

...

At that very moment, the young master and mistress were protecting themselves from the danger of an exploding oven.

The two Kuzuryuus in the kitchen finally deemed it safe enough to poke their heads from under the table.

"Shit... is it over?" the young mistress said.

Kuzuryuu looked at the forlorn-looking oven and grimaced. "Yeah, I think so. Wow, I screwed up, didn't I?"

"You certainly did!" his sister exclaimed. "Holy crap, Fuyu-nii! What _did_ you put in that cake anyway?!"

"It was nothing weird, I swear!" Kuzuryuu protested.

"Of course it was nothing weird," she sighed.

Suddenly Kuzuryuu glanced at the clock. "Crap...! I'm running out of time! Peko's gonna come out any minute now!"

"Hurry up then!" his sister cried, then paused. "Hey! That means you've just admitted that you _are_ making a cake for—"

"Shut the fuck up."

* * *

...

A little while later, Peko went out of the bathroom smiling. So many memories of her and her yakuza life. It all started seventeen years ago today. No one may remember, but she was enjoying it all the same.

Suddenly, in the hall, she bumped into the young master. He had his hands behind his back, and... was he blushing even more than usual...?

"Peko..." he started. "Um... happy birthday!"

Peko's smile suddenly vanished.

_So he remembered? This wasn't how today was supposed to go!_

"Young Master... I did not think you remembered."

"Of course I remember!" he exclaimed. "You're my friend, Peko."

"F-friend?"

_No I'm not, Young Master! I am your tool! This is definitely not how today is supposed to go! I do not need any wishes! A tool doesn't need any wishes!_

She hadn't said anything else when suddenly Kuzuryuu thrust the thing he had been hiding behind his back at her. "Peko, I made you something. I'm sorry if I fucking screwed up. I'm not good at all at these things, shit, I'm sorry."

The second the object left his hands, he shoved them into his pockets and turned around. "Just... just throw it away. I know, it looks like fucking crap."

Peko looked down at the object in her hands.

...It was a cake.

It was white, obviously vanilla-flavored. It was decorated with strawberries and candles. _Happy Birthday Peko!_ was written across the top in red icing.

However, it also looked as if it was on the verge of toppling over. The top of the cake wasn't level, so the candles weren't standing straight. Some of the strawberries had fallen over. And the H in "birthday" looked a bit squashed, as if whoever had written it had misspelled the word.

And Peko loved it.

"Thank you... Young Master... I am very..." – she searched for the right word – "...touched. I feel honored that you have made me something as incredible as this... And that you have remembered my birthday."

Kuzuryuu turned around again. "Keh... do you mean it?"

Peko nodded. "Of course, Young Master. I would never lie to you."

"Shit, don't mention it, Peko." He blushed. "I'm sorry, I screwed up and it looks like crap now."

"It does not," Peko assured him, and he brightened instantly. "Really? Then do you want to cut it?"

Peko nodded. "Yes. Let us cut your cake."

"_Your_ cake," corrected Kuzuryuu, helping Peko carry it to a table.

"_Our_ cake," said Peko.

Kuzuryuu blushed. "All right. Our cake."

* * *

...

Young Mistress Kuzuryuu was standing behind one of those big pillars this time. She was watching her brother give the cake to Peko.

_Those two!_ she thought with a small smile. _Fuyu-nii and Peko are so adorable together._

The smile still playing on her lips, she continued to watch as Kuzuryuu brought the cake to the table with Peko walking alongside him.

_Fuyu-nii likes Peko... And I can tell that Peko likes Fuyu-nii too. I don't know if he notices it or not, but deep down, she does. They're like a match made in heaven._ She suddenly sighed. It was a shame that Peko thought of herself as a tool. It was the only thing keeping them apart.

...And then she saw that one of the corners of the bamboo rug in her brother's way was sticking up.

Her eyes widened. "Fuyu-nii..."

Too late.

He tripped, and the cake left his hands and seemed to hang there in midair. For a second, anyway.

The young mistress squeezed her eyes shut. _Oh, Fuyu-nii!_

The only thing she heard next was her brother's cursing. "Gaaah... Shit!"

But in the background, she also heard soft chuckles that belonged to Peko. Then she heard her say, "Never mind, Young Master. Let us go into the kitchen and I will assist you in making another one. We will make it together."

"Are you sure, Peko? Since today's your birthday, I'd meant to make you something on my own, but I totally screwed up... I didn't mean to involve you in anything... I'm sorry."

"That is all right, Young Master."

After a pause, she heard her brother say, "...All right. We'll make another one. It was probably a good thing it fell anyway since it looked more like shit than anything else."

"Young Master... it did not look that bad..."

"Whatever you say, Peko."

At that moment, the young mistress opened her eyes again...

...just in time to see the gangster take the swordswoman's hand before disappearing into the kitchen.

_Holy crap, they're both so adorable,_ she thought happily...

... But that was before she remembered the oven explosion in the kitchen, whose aftermath her brother hadn't cleaned up.

She groaned inwardly.

_Oh, Fuyu-nii!_

_-End-_


End file.
